new blog, pt 2, this time with feeling
or at least some real explanation. So I’ve been using a system called Jekyll to publish the blog for many years. It’s a great system for a narrow range of uses; if you’re writing from a computer, and have minimal image needs, and know git and the command line reasonably well, it’s easy and intuitive to set up and use on a little server somewhere on the internet. Since it generated static files, it’s very fast once deployed. It also helped that at the time it was written in my language-of-choice, and could use my flavor of templating language (textile, although I’ve since switched to markdown).
So here I am, 7 years later. I do most of my writing and image processing on my iPad, saving the big computer for things like heavy photoshop and ‘real’ work. Not that photo-editing and writing aren’t real, but they don’t need the big iron. (Yes I am totally a nerd that thinks of his computer as Big Iron, like a gun in an old country song). Actually, probably nothing I do really needs a ton of processing power; I always want for more but what I know I need instead, from years in the trenches of writing it, is software that is more optimized for my needs; this is pointed especially at the super laggy desktop versions of Lightroom.
So we come back to this here blog. I could compose it by hand in HTML, but we’re not banging rocks together here. I’m a damn software developer, I make rocks think for a living. Seriously, like I was saying above, what I need is a piece of software tailored to my needs. Now, all software is eventually tech debt, and really you should avoid writing it as much as practicable, but dammit, I wanted to blog from the iPad.
Since I started using jekyll, the world has moved on. I changed jobs roughly once a year, picked up some skills, then some more, then forgot a lot of it, specializing in a language called Elixir. Elixir has a few things going for it, mostly heavily technical, but the sum of those technical parts is it’s very reliable, and very fast. Something like an order of magnitude (that’s 10 times faster for those at home) faster than Ruby programs doing roughly the same thing (YMMV, benchmarks are not actual usage, etc etc). I built a system in 2015 to speed up a part of a system at {undisclosed employer} and it was a ton faster and everyone was happy. A month later, we got to looking at the memory usage graph, and saw a weird sawtooth pattern. The processes were dying every 36 hours or so because the box was running out of memory, and nobody had noticed for a month. The reason being the reliability I was talking about. The process dies, and the system that runs the code (called a ‘virtual machine’) just restarts it, and because of the rest of the architecture of the system, nothing was lost.
But Jekyll was working for me, and until recently, I basically thought, you know it’s just barely possible to blog from the iPad, if I make a big effort, I can do it. And I think a few of the posts since last September were part of that struggle. It was clunky. It was slow. It required 5 different apps, including ssh’ing into my server, to make it go, but it went.
And then, I didn’t blog for a while. Lots of reasons. The Ankle that took me out for several months. Travel, which should result in a ton of blogging, just didn’t. Maybe I was tired, but it didn’t help that I was fighting the tooling. It’s a poor craftsman that blames his tools, of course, but a worse one that doesn’t recognize when there’s room for a better hammer.
So, a couple weeks ago, I started work on this, a new, streamlined blog, and a couple days ago, it went live. The first new post directly precedes this one. Old posts were imported, but old links have been broken. Sorry. It’s a pretty simple web app, with a login and some forms that create database entities that correspond pretty much exactly to what you see on the screen: posts and design and pictures. The pictures also got an improvement: they’re sized to fit your screen, instead of a static width. The visual design as a whole is a work in progress; changes coming there. I may add more features. Don’t expect comments.
(the photos in this post are from the first day of the road trip when we went home over the holidays; we drove to Santa Fe in one day, about 18 hours from door to door; the sunrise and sunset were great. I know, more sunrise/sunset, more golden hours, whatever. They’re next in the queue.)
